Fealty
by Tavina
Summary: He had sworn his broken sword to her twenty years ago, from a sick bed. He swears his fealty to her every day on bended knee. Imperial China AU. KakaHana. Sanitize Server Prompt: OTP.


**Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by UmbreonGurl and Fishebake.**

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"Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test."

— Alain de Botton, _Essays in Love_

* * *

It is night when he is summoned.

It is often night.

He slips through the lacquer polished dark wooden doors of the outer courtyard like a breath of wind. The guards outside don't even blink when he arrives, already too used to him being summoned at all odd hours of the day and night, straight to the Empress's personal chambers.

There is no one else in the palace with hair his shade of white, and an unlined face. No one else with a masked face and the distinct knife wound scar over their left eye.

They know very well that they are incapable of stopping him. If he wishes to enter, they are no defense. They see him only because he offers them that courtesy, what he doesn't offer is the courtesy of letting them see his face.

No one sees his face these days, no one but the Empress.

He pauses a moment by the koi pond, admires the lotus flowers bobbing lightly on the balmy summer breeze, the soft rustle of bamboo leaves, one black and white koi fish swimming lazily among the reeds.

His cloth shoes make no sound as he glides up the cobbled path among the tree peonies.

There's no one else in here then, no blade of grass bent, no drop of water spilled. All is untouched.

As it should be.

His Empress is not to be disturbed, not tonight. It is what he can offer, at least a few hours of uninterrupted solace.

He sets a hand upon the inner door of the courtyard himself and proceeds into outer hall.

Here, it is all red and gold silk hangings, dark tables and benches, colorful pillows and green glazed vases.

Candles flicker, dancing as he passes. The entire hall is desolate. She's sent her maidservants away then.

Were it any other man here alone with the Empress, there's bound to be _talk. _

But he is the Empress's Dog, and she is the Empress, so there is bound to be extra talk.

He drops to one knee, a hand on the hilt of his sword, his head bowed when he pushes open the final door and finds her sitting at her desk, her side profile to him in the light.

"Your Majesty."

He waits, listening to the sound of her silk sleeve brushing against the parchment, the slight clink as she sets down her brush, before she turns to him with a quiet snort.

"Hana is fine, Kakashi."

He looks up, rises, and comes to stand on the other side of her table.

He had called her Lady Hana once.

"That wouldn't be correct." She'd been Lady Hana _once, _daughter of a third tier scholarly government official in the Bureau of Records. Neither highly placed or lowly.

She raises one dainty brow, and he continues. "You are no longer my Lady Hana. You are my empress, Your Majesty."

She smiles, a wicked sharp thing she would never show to the outside world, and for one brief moment he is lost to memory.

* * *

_Plum flowers falling in the Inuzuka Estate, fifteen years before…_

"Do you suppose this really will help?" She leans against the railing, watching the petals drift by on the wind. The cream silk of her sleeve falls against the sharp turn of her cheekbone. She is unusually pensive today, as his Lady Hana not often is.

Too often, she'd leap without looking.

That was how he had ended up here, in her service after all. She'd picked up a stray on the side of the road leading into the capital, and that stray had stayed.

"That is not for me to say." It is the last month she will stay here among her family, among the kennels of her father's favorite hounds, among the plum flowers falling here in a house far more free than where she is going.

The imperial palace is no place a woman ever returns from. Not even servants are released to go home without the best years of their lives spent in its service.

"I will only be a fifth tier concubine." She casts him a glance. "Do you know how many concubines there are in the imperial harem?" She sighs, arm flopping forward, laying her entire cheek against her outstretched arm, as she blows a stray plum petal away from her forehead. "How does His Imperial Majesty have time to care about them all?"

"He will care about you if he knows what's good for him."

They say that the walls have ears, but they are not in the forbidden city yet. Here at least, he will not be dragged out and beaten to death for whatever thoughts he might have about a nearly sixty year old man who still sent out a search for young women to fill out more ranks in an ever growing harem this very year.

The rumors say it is because two concubines had died of unnatural causes. He would not be much surprised if they were true.

The Emperor's harem is rumored to be one of the most vicious back palaces of the dynasty. Concubines died all the time. He would not be much surprised if this were also true.

The same vicious back palace politics and scheming is to be his Lady Hana's every day now. He will have to be vigilant.

But then, the help he offers is merely a sword to kill whoever needs killing. Whatever ambitions she may have of rising through the ranks and benefiting her family will have to be on her merit alone.

"But I suppose the old lecher wouldn't even know a good thing if it sat up and slapped him."

"Kakashi!" She slaps a hand over his mouth, glances around the courtyard once, as though checking to make sure that his words had not somehow magically travelled directly to the ear of the Emperor and drags him back into her rooms. "You can't say something like that when we get to the Palace, do you hear me?"

He blinks at her. "I didn't say anything that wasn't true."

She shakes her head and frowns at him, the opal in her hairpin flashing in the morning light. "Just know you can't say it in the Palace or else you'll lose your head."

He bows his head. "Yes, of course."

It doesn't escape him that she hadn't _disagreed _with his assessment of the _Emperor himself. _

When he next looks up at her, she has her habitual smile on her face, teeth flashing white in the light, sharp and swift, dark eyes dancing with flecks of gold. "I hear there were puppies born in the kennels just last night. We should go and see."

He falls in step behind when she strides towards the door.

She has never been more wild and free.

She has never been more beautiful.

And there never was more finality to it.

A month later, her parents saw them off at the door as she stepped into a palanquin dripping in red, a veil hiding a face that the Emperor would never bother to behold.

* * *

"Have I lost my name now?" she asks, "Even in private with my eldest friend?"

The word burns.

He has followed her for twenty years, has killed at her command, has come here to the palace, where he had sworn to never go, has ridden the heights of Heaven, crawled the depths of Hell.

_Friend. _

"Power isn't kind to those who wear a crown." He bows his head once more. "Who am I to kill this night?"

"No one." She sets her hands folded together on the table between them. "I called you here to talk."

"I find that hard to believe."

More often than not, of late, he has been called into the Empress's personal chambers late at night because there was some political rival who needed to lose his wits if not his head.

It hadn't always been so.

In her earliest days as Empress, she'd called him here more often than not to talk or to try some new dessert dish or simply because she'd missed him and wanted to see his face. It hadn't been proper, but it had been the scraps at the table he could not help but return to.

And try as he might he has always been sentimental.

The past is filled with hungry ghosts that gnaw away at him until all that remains are skin and bones — the vital organs of him removed.

"I'm worried about you." She lifts the teapot on the table, flips one of her extra teacups right side up and pours him a cup of tea that he is ill suited to refuse. In all the long years, he has never refused her anything. "You were injured last time."

He pulls down his mask and takes a sip of his tea, lets the warmth of it spread down through him. "A mistake. It will not happen again."

Surely not a mistake he would have made in his younger years, but he had moved a fraction too slow, had let a guardsman's sword graze his cheek.

And then another sword had torn a slash up the back of his left calf.

When he had returned to her, he had been trailing blood and limping, traitors executed, but not as cleanly as he would have liked.

But his face is not as unlined as it was, and the white of his hair no longer belies his age the same way it used to. He is only a man, and the years have aged him as time ages all men.

And yet, the help he offers is merely a sword to kill whoever needs killing. What is he without that?

She reaches out across the table, touches the scratch mark on his right cheekbone, fingers lingering, lips a thin, hard line.

"I don't like to see you injured." Her hand tilts, the angle changing so that its entirety cups his cheek instead.

The sudden loud pounding of his heart threatens to drown out any other words she might say, all of his concentration displaced to focus on her thumb as it traces his cheekbone before her fingertips graze the spike of his pulse.

"It reminds me too much of how I found you."

He had come to her with nothing, had not meant to meet her, had not even known of her existence before her maidservants had pulled his half delirious body out of the standing water and festering swarm of flies of the ditch into which he had fallen after the last battle.

He had nothing more than the broken sword in his hands.

And twenty years from that day, he sits here as the only empress of all China who dared to rule like a man presses a quiet kiss to his forehead, a hand against his cheek, a hand on his hair.

She treats him so, and he can but tremble, lost to the tempered wildfire gold of her love.

"Care for yourself, Kakashi." She still has not let him go. Even if her hands were to move, she'd won what's left of him long ago. She will never let him go in this life. "We neither of us are as young as when we first began. The storms we have weathered will not weather us again." _For perhaps, in the next storm, we fall. _

It is on the tip of his tongue, if only he could find the barest hint of breath.

"And yet I'd choose to walk with you." _In all lives, if I had to choose again. _

He had sworn his broken sword to her twenty years ago, from a sick bed.

He swears his fealty to her every day on bended knee.

"There is another storm coming." There's a hint of rueful sadness to her smile. "Walk with me?"

"As you wish."

_Always. _

* * *

"Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red."

— Kait Rokowski.

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**A.N. **Bc I'm trash for KakaHana and I'm trash for Empress/Bodyguard dynamics. This oneshot was written for Iaso's Prompt in the Sanitize Server: OTP.

I'll see you all in the regularly scheduled fanfiction hopefully soon!

~Tavina


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